


Schelkunchik

by bellatemple



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Holidays, Humor, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-26 19:02:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/286807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellatemple/pseuds/bellatemple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>This was the place Sam chose for them to spend the night, when he was exhausted into a stupor and Dean's jaw hurt so badly he could barely walk.  Dean was going to have to throttle some sense back into his brother, just as soon as he got the world to stay still long enough to off whatever fucking spirits were still lurking around trying to throw the world's lamest Christmas party.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Schelkunchik

**Author's Note:**

> This sucker has been eating my brain all week. Oh, and because she told me to, I'll go ahead and credit [](http://roque-clasique.livejournal.com/profile)[**roque_clasique**](http://roque-clasique.livejournal.com/) for the broken jaw. . . . ;D

Dean shifted sideways, the leather of the seat creaking beneath him as he did his best to become one with the passenger side door. He pressed the side of his jaw as best he could against the cold window glass, hoping to dull the pulsating throb radiating up and down his face, from his temple to his neck. Condensation clouded the glass as he panted through his nose, tag teaming with the flashes of white that accompanied every little dip, mound, or pothole the Impala encountered on the road to obscure his vision. Not that there was much to see. The light dusting that had started when Sam had dragged him from the bar and thrown him into the passenger seat had turned into fat, lumpy flakes at some point over the last few miles, and even in the few moments Dean managed to focus, all he saw was a fuzz of white and black.

He shifted again, searching for the magical combination of cold and pressure against the epicenter of the pain, the tender spot just behind his back molars where the pool ball had slammed into his face.

"Hey," Sam called from the driver's seat, his voice slower than it had any right to be, and warped by the faint buzzing in Dean's ears. "You need another ice pack?"

 _Fuck, please,_ Dean wanted to say. The last one, a stolen motel towel stuffed full of snow, sat in a lukewarm wet lump on the top of his left thigh. Or better yet, he needed to get out of the fucking car, into some place warm and safe that didn't buck like a mechanical bull. He needed a mattress, maybe with lots of little pillows he could shove under his neck and around his face, something soft to hold his jaw as still as possible so he could get some sleep. Some place where a warm body would curl up behind him and hold on so he couldn't fall off the world.

Lisa had been really, really good at that last bit.

Screw it. He needed a time machine to drive back to three hours ago, where he could recognize his drunken attempt to hustle cash as the really fucking bad idea it was. Maybe go back a little further and tell Sam to knock off the beaten puppy looks and mournful sighs that had driven him into the bar in the first place. Or go back a full year and a half and knock Sam the fuck out so he'd never say yes to Lucifer and never end up the soulless shell, never have to have his soul shoved back into him by Death himself, and never make those puppy faces and mournful sounds at all.

Right. And then they could go fly kites and pick dandelions in the fucking park.

So what came out, when Dean finally managed to get his synapses firing in the right order to attempt an answer, was "fuck you", or to be more accurate, "fug-oo". And even that was enough to make Dean lose a few precious minutes to the whirling of white and black and agonizing red.

When he'd blinked his way back out of the fugue state, they were stopped, and Sam's hand was a ten pound weight dragging on his shoulder.

"Sorry," Sam said, when Dean couldn't hold back a strangled whimper. "I can't drive any more. We're gonna have to crash here, tonight."

Dean rolled his eyes gingerly in Sam's direction, managing to make out a blurred, double image of half of Sam's face, sagging lids framed by stringy hair. Scratch the puppy, Sam looked more like a geriatric bloodhound on his final trip to the vet.

And, fuck, Dean should have known. Sam had spent the last week trying to catch up on a year and a half's worth of sleep, and Dean had managed to find the most out of the way bar in smallest little badlands town he could find to get himself into the stupidest bar fight of his life. Of course Sam wasn't going to make it the fifty miles to the nearest hospital. Dean had fucked them both over but good this time, and now they had a cold, cramped car nap to look forward to because of it.

He must have made another noise, some gurgle or grunt or something, because Sam leaned further into his personal space and shook his head. "Not here, man. _Here._ " And Dean wondered if he was concussed on top of the broken jaw, because Sam sure seemed to think that made sense. He tugged at Dean's arm and jerked his head backwards, and after another few dizzying moments of wondering which one of them had lost their mind, Dean realized Sam was trying to get him to look out the driver's side window. A house loomed up out of the falling snow, maybe fifty feet from the car, its windows dark, its wrap-around porch sagging. It was an old fashioned farm house, maybe Victorian or Edwardian or some other English monarchian in structure, three floors arranged in ever decreasing tiers like a wedding cake. The dormer window at the very top floor was like a black hole against the thick coating of snow, the glass probably long since broken out, and Dean thought he could hear the rattle and squeak of a busted screen door blowing about in the wind.

Sam had managed to find them the most haunted looking house Dean had seen in years.

"'Re iggih mm."

Sam raised an exhausted eyebrow. "You'd rather sleep in the car?"

Dean shivered at the very idea, sending fresh sparks of agony through the right side of his face.

They were so fucked.

*

Dean had no idea how Sam managed to get him into the house. He didn't remember much about the feat, himself -- it turned out climbing out of the car and attempting to walk through the falling snow with a likely concussion and a broken jaw was more stress than his body was willing to handle. He could remember the tumble out the door well enough, and Sam slinging his arm over his shoulders, but after that it was all flashes of twirling lights, sideways houses, and the feeling like his stomach was attempting to force an exit out the top of his head, then falling forward to crash on the world's mustiest couch. After that, it was nothing but blackness and pain until someone dropped a gong on his head.

He startled, arching up from his sprawl, and tumbled sideways as the sound reverberated through his skull, persistent enough to keep him from blacking out again, despite the hot pokers shooting in every direction from the side of his mouth. He landed in an ungraceful heap on the floor, his whole head buzzing with the sound, and flailed for some sort of weapon. By the third bass note clang, the noise had migrated far enough out of the center of his brain for him to begin to register his surroundings. He was lying on a rough hardwood floor, the finish long since worn away in long, thin scratches that made his palms itch as he got them centered beneath him. On his left was an ancient velvet chaise lounge, its threadbare surface deep gray in the low light filtering in through the enormous bay windows on either end of the long room. He faced a grand, empty fireplace, at least six feet across and probably five feet tall, next to which stood an extremely dead pine tree, its branches all but bare, though it still glittered faintly with heavy ball-shaped ornaments and strips of tinsel. Below it lay a carpet of moldering brown needles, interspersed here and there with lumps of tallow from long absent candles and the occasional boxish shape of an old present.

Sam lay stretched out a few feet from Dean's head, dead to the world despite the insistent toll of the bell which had woken Dean up. A quick scan of the walls revealed a grandfather clock topped by an elaborately carved owl in the corner. The glass fronting of the clock was busted in, its hands bent out and immobile, and its numbers worn away to next to nothing, but the tarnished brass pendulum still swung hypnotically, chiming eight, nine, ten, eleven. . . . On the twelfth ring, a flash illuminated the entire room, nearly blinding Dean, and for a moment, the empty, abandoned place seemed to be full of people, men, women, and children, all dancing one of those stuffy old choreographed things they did in all the old period movies that Dean pretended he'd never seen. If Dean were anything but a hunter, he might have assumed he was seeing things, but in the darkness following the brilliant flash, he was certain the owl on top of the old clock had transformed into a sharp-nosed, eyepatched old man, his spindly legs and arms splayed wide in an approximation of wings, his single, brilliant blue eye fixed with malevolent glee on Dean's position next to the lounge.

This was the place Sam chose for them to spend the night, when he was exhausted into a stupor and Dean's jaw hurt so badly he could barely walk. Dean was going to have to throttle some sense back into his brother, just as soon as he got the world to stay still long enough to off whatever fucking spirits were still lurking around trying to throw the world's lamest Christmas party.

Sam had at least put down salt, two tight circles around the chaise lounge and his own crash space, which was pretty much the only way to keep spirits away from you in a place of unknown activity. Maybe Dean would only throttle him a little. Unfortunately, Sam hadn't accounted for Dean falling off the lounge. That circle was well and truly broken.

Another flash lit the room, this time illuminating a single figure, a small girl with long blonde hair wearing a flimsy, tattered white nightgown decorated with fine blue ribbons. Her hair hung lank around her pale face. She caught Dean's eye and put a slim finger to her lips, then glanced off to the side, towards the old tree. Dean followed her glance. The tree was expanding before his eyes, stretching taller and wider as the ceiling retreated behind it. A scratching, scuttling sound started up from behind it, and Dean swallowed convulsively, sending fresh pangs of agony across his face.

The tree wasn't growing. He was shrinking. And from behind the tree crept a rat, twice the size of Dean, its eyes glinting sharp red in the brightening phantom candlelight.

Dean scrambled up from his prone position, making it to his knees before his dizziness caught him short and the room started to sway.

The girl's spirit stepped between Dean and the tree, and through her translucent form, he made out the figures of several more rats, crawling across the carpet of pine needles and pushing themselves up onto their hind legs, now the size of bears. Dean shoved himself swaying to his feet. In his experience, spirits of young girls were some of the most vicious and creepifying, and he wasn't going to assume this one would be any different, even if she did seem to be trying to protect him. He reached down with his left hand -- even moving his right _shoulder_ hurt, pulling on tendons that reached all the way up to his jaw -- and pulled out the knife he kept tucked into his boot. The iron blade was only about the length of his hand, but he'd apparently left his gun in the car, and it was all he had to defend himself with against what were clearly supernatural rats, who now formed a wall of sharp-toothed viciousness in front of the enormous tree. Dean would be fucked before he let himself be eaten by rodents while playing Thumbelina with a whip-thin spectral pre-teen.

The low sound of some sort of pipe wound through the room, playing a militaristic march. Dean glanced around, unwilling to take his eyes off the spirit or the rats for longer than strictly necessary, but couldn't locate the sound's source. As the music grew ever more insistent, a drum beat was added, a stiff, halting noise like stilted footsteps. The spirit spun, rising up on her toes like a dancer and then leaning into a graceful sidestep. She seemed to gasp. The drumming beat grew louder, swelling behind Dean, and he finally turned to look.

A regiment of stiff little soldiers, wearing bright red uniform coats and tall, marching-band looking hats, marched out from behind Sam's sleeping form like the vengeful armies of Lilliput, dull tin swords already pointed forward at the mob of rats. They settled into a line at Dean's back and froze into position as though awaiting his orders. The sound of the pipe tapered off into a persistent vamp as the two armies, rats and soldiers, faced off on the battlefield of the old room, all of them staring at Dean. The spirit clutched her hands to her chest, flickering and seeming to vibrate in anticipation.

Dean adjusted his grip on his knife. He was surrounded and in pain. He had absolutely no idea where to begin his attack, or even if he should attempt one at all. The music grew more impatient, and Dean's grip on his knife grew sweaty, the air stifling, though the room had been rather cold up until that point.

Sam coughed in his sleep and Dean startled, the slight jump jarring his broken jaw. The room whited out momentarily, and Dean couldn't control the pained squeak as he brought his hand up to press against the side of his face. If he could just hold his head on, maybe everything would turn out alright. . . .

The spirit flickered in front of him, coming to a halt only about half a foot away. She came up to Dean's chest, and up close, Dean could make out the washed out gray of her eyes, the way her high cheekbones jutted out over sunken cheeks, the sharpness of her collar bones beneath the sleeveless nightgown. She tilted her head at him, then popped up on her toes again, pulling one of the blue ribbons free from her gown and holding it out. Dean took a step back, but the line of soldiers blocked his retreat. The spirit stepped in again before he could bring his knife into play, wrapping the ribbon under his jaw and up over his head, tying it into a quick bow. She danced back out of easy knife range, looking pleased with herself. Dean panted through his nose and ran his fingers over the ribbon where it lay flat against his cheek. It was cold and silky smooth, and it held his jaw firmly immobile. For the first time since the pool ball had hit his cheek, Dean felt like he could get his thoughts into order.

He was four inches tall, apparently elected the leader of an army of toy soldiers against a hoard of giant, slathering rats, at the side of a twelve year old dead girl, under the watchful eye of a wooden owl that may or may not have been the most evil looking old man Dean had had the misfortune to lay eyes on. With a classical orchestra providing a soundtrack.

He kind of missed the pain-filled muddle. Things hadn't made any more sense, but he'd at least cared a lot less about it.

And then the Rat King arrived.

*

The room erupted into chaos. The girl's spirit had disappeared off to one side, apparently only there to watch as the soldiers faced off against the rats, falling into a ridiculous, spinning battle. Claws scraped against swords, adding an odd under-current of shrieks to the insistent pound of woodwinds and strings. Dean did his best to keep to the sidelines himself, but while the spirit had managed to flit in between the battling couples as though her movements had been choreographed, Dean found himself blocked at every turn by the lunges and parries of the combatants. He swung freely with his knife, hacking off a bit of fur here, an epaulet there, but the figures he aimed for danced out of the way of his knife as surely as they danced in the way of his steps. His jaw had settled into a dull throb, distracting rather than entirely debilitating, and he occasionally paused to finger the ribbon on his head, debating whether or not to pull it off. On the one hand, it definitely helped, way better than the ice pack or the cold window had. On the other hand, it was a freaking _baby blue ghost-ribbon_.

A hole opened up in the crowd, giving Dean a straight shot to Sam's prone form. He tried to kick the kid in the head -- if _that_ didn't wake Sam up, then Dean had no idea what would -- but found himself blocked before he could reach him by writhing, snarling figure of the Rat King. The music swelled, and Dean groaned, settling into a defensive stance. He really wished he had his gun.

While the spirit, the soldiers, and the rats had all taken on an almost cartoon quality in their pantomiming, the Rat King remained a nightmarish, grotesque figure. It wore a crown and a cape, red velvet lined with spotted white fur, as cliche and cartoony as the uniforms the soldiers wore, but the red of the velvet was the color of old blood, and the white trim was smudged with dirt and stained with things Dean didn't much want to think about. The crown was balanced over seven heads, all meeting together at the back so that the Rat King could stare at any direction at all times. Its seven tails tangled together into a knotted, crusted mass under its fourteen hind feet, and in places the flesh of the varied limbs seemed to have melted together. It was a rat king in every sense of the word, and Dean rather wished he'd never known such a thing could exist in the world.

He swiped at the creature with his knife, but the Rat King seemed unconcerned with the bite of sharp iron through its reaching fingers. The three heads most facing Dean snarled and seemed to smile as the thing trembled and circled its way forward, advancing on Dean.

The soldiers and rats around them all seemed to freeze, forming a corridor tableau of battle straight from some twisted children's book. Dean retreated down it, knife still held ready, even as he looked around for something that might be more useful. He managed to swipe one of the soldiers' swords, but the blade, nothing more than a flat piece of tin, bent against the Rat King's hide, and Dean threw the thing away. The Rat King backed Dean up all the way to the curved wooden leg of the chaise lounge at the end of the v-shaped line of combatants. Dean backed up flush against it, swiping again and again with his knife, hoping to strike the thing in one of its many eyes, or perhaps drive it up through the roof of one of the gaping mouths. The Rat King swiped back, its claws catching him across the chest, opening four burning slices from Dean's right collarbone to his left nipple. Dean hissed through his teeth, striking out with one foot to try and keep the beast back while he collected himself. The music crescendoed, and for the first time Dean began to wonder if he was really going to die here, four inches tall at the claws of a freaking _rat king_.

Then a flimsy blue slipper flew in out of nowhere and smacked the Rat King across one of its noses, and the creature collapsed like its neck had been snapped.

Dean stared. The Rat King didn't even twitch. He stretched out his foot and poked it in the ear, then kicked off its crown. When it still didn't move, he let himself relax against the leg of the chaise lounge, sliding slowly down until he was sitting on the floor, knife still clenched in both hands. He stared as the Rat King slowly faded from sight, leaving only its enormous crown behind. The soldiers and rats broke off in their battle, the rats scurrying away back to the enormous tree, the soldiers leaping joyfully into the air in an eerily synchronized fashion before marching off back to wherever they'd come from. An elaborate silver buggy pulled up along side one of the bay windows, drawn by a trio of delicate white mice the size of horses, and through the window, Dean could make out fat, fluffy snow flakes whirling and dancing joyfully, beckoning in time to the light, playful, tinkling music. The spirit of the young girl materialized in front of Dean, gingerly picking up the blue slipper and placing it back on her foot. She crouched down in front of Dean, smiling gently, and offered her hand.

Dean stabbed her in the face.

*

He woke up face down on the chaise lounge, the worn velvet wet where he'd managed to drool on it. Sam had his hand on his shoulder, shaking him gingerly. Bright sunlight streamed in through the bay windows, reflecting off the flawless blanket of white snow. Dean whimpered.

"Come on, man," Sam was saying. "Let's go get you some good painkillers."

Dean peered up at him without moving his head and grunted into the lounge. _Motherfucker_ , he wanted to say. _You slept through the most irritating haunted house, ever_. But his jaw was throbbing and his chest burned and, unlike Sam, he hadn't managed a night full of blissfully uninterrupted sleep, so instead he just pressed his head down into the lumpy upholstery and tried to forget, however briefly, that Sam existed.

He should have known it wouldn't work.

"What the hell is on your face?" Sam's finger slipped between Dean's uninjured right cheek and the silky fabric, rubbing at it. "Did you bandage yourself with _ribbon?_ "

Dean raised his head at that, peering up again. The dried blood on his chest stuck to the velvet, and Dean grunted as he yanked it away. "Shhuh uh," he said. Sam snorted.

"You shut up." He offered Dean a hand, and between the two of them, they managed to pull Dean away from the lounge and get him to his feet. Sam's brows pulled together tight like the tails of two rats -- and fuck, Dean did _not_ just make that comparison, even just in his head -- as he brushed a hand over Dean's chest and the four shallow scratches. "Did these happen last night?"

Dean was pretty sure Sam meant at the bar, but he nodded anyway. He wasn't sure he'd be able to explain the army of rats even if his jaw _was_ working properly, much less any of the rest of the freaking acid trip haunting he'd been through the night before. Sam winced in sympathy, then rubbed Dean's shoulders.

"I'm gonna try to clear a path out to the car. You wait here, okay?"

Dean nodded again, a little impressed with himself when it didn't start the room swaying or his stomach tumbling. He smirked tiredly at Sam and gave him a little wave, and Sam offered a faint smile -- the only kind Dean had seen from him since before he got his soul back -- in return. He clapped his hand to Dean's shoulder one more time and then headed for the door. Dean waited until he was sure Sam had gone, then turned back to the room at large.

Nothing in the room gave any indication of the battle that had happened the night before. The scratch marks on the floor had faded; there were no little rat bodies or rat king crowns lying around. The pendulum on the clock no longer swung. If Dean hadn't woken up with claw marks on his chest and a ribbon around his head, he might have thought the whole thing had been a dream.

He had, though. And even if he hadn't, he still wouldn't trust this house as far as he could throw a kid's slipper.

So he pulled a pack of paper matches from his pocket. He ran his thumb over the cover for a moment, then lit the whole thing and tossed it into the bed of pine needles under the dry, barren tree. The thing caught like it'd been doused in gasoline, and he spent a moment just watching it burn, waiting for hoards of rats to come spilling out. When nothing happened but the pop and crackle of burning pine, he turned to the grandfather clock, glaring balefully up at the carved owl.

"'unno oo yar," he mumbled to it. "Buh er uggin scrrrd n'w, muh-fugger."

He wrapped his hands around the edge of the clock and heaved, tipping the thing over onto its side and pitching it top first into the burning Christmas tree. The owl seemed to flutter for a moment, and the shriek of the floorboards beneath the clock's shifting weight had an almost musical, if agonized, quality to it. Dean smiled to himself as he watched it burn, picturing the malevolent old man's face twisting up in pain, his fluffly white hair eaten away by the flame.

When Sam came back a few moments later, Dean was still standing there, his shirt pulled over his nose in deference to the smoke. Sam looked from the fire, which was slowly spreading along the plastered walls, to Dean. Dean waited for the questions, the worried looks, the "what the hell, Dean?!"s, but they never came. Sam stared into the fire, his face hard, then put out a hand to lightly pull on Dean's shoulder, tugging him away.

"You ready to go?"

Dean nodded and grunted an assent. Sam nodded back, wrapping his hand around Dean's arm to steady him as they made their way back towards the door. Dean didn't need the support -- the ache that had so overwhelmed him on their way into the house the night before had died down into something contained just in his head and neck -- but he didn't shake it off. As they stepped out into the gray light of morning, the burning house at their backs, Dean paused, then bumped Sam's shoulder with his own. When Sam looked, Dean gave him as much of a grin as he could offer.

"Mer kirshmyth," Dean said. Sam bumped his shoulder back.

"Yeah man. You, too."

 _Finis_

 **AN:** Dean's broken jaw mumblings:  
"'Re iggih mm." = "You're kidding me."  
"Shhuh uh," = "Shut up,"  
"'unno oo yar. . . . Buh er uggin scrrrd n'w, muh-fugger." = "Dunno who you are. . . . But you're screwed now, motherfucker."  
"Mer kirshmyth," = "Merry Christmas"


End file.
